Refuge From The Dead | Book 2 | Dead Summer

by Masters, A. L.

  Jared had filched the keys from the office manager’s desk one day and made copies of them on his lunch break. Anna knew when the keys came out something spectacular was about to happen.

  Jared took his eyes from hers and she clamped her lips together to stop herself from grinning. He was about to retaliate for Darla’s olfactory popcorn assault…she just knew it. He glanced around once more, making sure that everyone was settled in for the hour-long sales meeting. Sometimes there were stragglers taking bathroom breaks or fetching coffee. For now, they were alone.

  Jared bent down to get something out of his desk then stood up, using his six foot-two-inch height to see over the tops of the cubicles that littered the center of the large room. The secretary, Jill, was watching YouTube with her ear buds in. It was her custom during the meetings, and lunch, and any time she wasn’t specifically given a task.

  She heard the rattle of Jared’s cinnamon flavored Altoids. He ate them obsessively and she would always associate that smell with him. She forced down the attraction that she felt for him. She didn’t want to want a relationship with him; it would ruin everything. Things would get weird, and he wouldn’t be her best friend anymore. Then she would be all alone.

  When he gave the all-clear, Anna followed Jared to Darla’s workspace. She wondered what his plan was as he squatted down and unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk. Anna snorted and held back laughter as he bypassed Darla’s purse and grabbed her secret stash of popcorn packets. She even had butter-flavored oil and cheese powder in there.

  How the woman could fail to properly make a bag of popcorn after all these years boggled her mind. She either did it because she liked it burned, or she liked to impose the atrocious scent on everyone at the office. She was that kind of person.

  “Bingo!” he mouthed to her silently and raised his eyebrows.

  She gave him two thumbs up and a nod.

  Jared motioned her to follow. He pressed a finger to his lips as they crossed to the back hallway and passed by the conference room door. The door was thin, and they heard the monotone droning of Mr. Hubbard giving his completely uninspired motivational speech. He recycled the same one every few months. Sometimes Jared repeated it from his cubicle when they were having a particularly dull day. His impersonation skills were impressive.

  She listened at the door again. Nope. They hadn’t even gotten into the sales reports yet. Anna thanked God yet again that she didn’t have to take part in the weekly meetings. She and Jared were support personnel. While they didn’t make the bigger bucks from commissions, they also didn’t have the pressures of the sales team. They were happier for it.

  Jared stopped in front of the ladies’ restroom, and he waited a moment before opening the door and motioning her in. She brushed past him, not failing to catch a whiff of his delicious scent.

  She reprimanded herself severely for that.

  He followed her in and shut the door behind them, locking the deadbolt with a quiet snick. The air was redolent with the co-mingling smells of bleach, air freshener, and mildew.

  “Hey, it’s nice in here!” he whispered, looking around. “I see you guys got new paint. We put in a requisition form for a gallon of Sherwin William’s Shoji White. You know, give the place a little pizazz. Never heard back,” he said frowning at the ladies’ room’s newly painted walls.

  He touched an oil-rubbed bronze fixture. “Think we could have one of these faucets?” he asked, and she couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

  “Can we hurry this up? I don’t want to go to jail for theft,” she whispered, motioning for him to hurry.

  “Calm down, Anna. The most you would get is a misdemeanor and a fine, and after we explained the situation, I’m sure they’d take our side.”

  She snorted, “Leave it to you to try talk cops out of theft charges. You really should join the Sales Team.”

  “Okay, are you ready?” he asked.

  She raised her eyebrows in question as he grinned at her and pulled the keys from his pocket. She held the loose packages of popcorn as he found the right key.

  “You’re putting her popcorn in the tampon dispenser?! Nobody ever uses it!” She said, laughing.

  “I know. Last time this thing was filled? 1992,” he said with mock seriousness.

  Anna laughed and covered her mouth, feeling more like a fifteen-year-old kid pulling pranks at school than a twenty-five-year-old. “Are you serious?”

  “Oh, I’m totally serious,” he said, and she believed him.

  After they dumped the packets into the dispenser -and indeed found several severely dated tampon packages- they relocked it and left quietly. Anna thought they were finished, and turned back toward the cubicles, but Jared grabbed her elbow and steered her toward the small breakroom at the very end of the hallway.

  “What are we doing now?” she asked him quietly.

  “We are disabling the enemy unit,” he divulged.

  He moved ahead of her and gave elaborate hand signals that she assumed were meant to be military in origin. She was fairly certain that no military unit ever used the exaggerated-looking stuff he was coming up with.

  “Where did you learn all that?” she whispered as they crept softly down the hall.

  “T.V.”

  That figures.

  They made it to the break room without further conversation and without getting caught.

  Anna raised her eyebrows as Jared took the glass microwave plate and roller from the microwave. He jumped up on the counter easily and put them on the very top of the cabinets. She should know better than to be surprised at anything he does anymore.

  “Nobody ever cleans up here,” he said with a disgusted look. “And we have mice.”

  Anna wrinkled her nose at the thought of the kitchen surfaces being contaminated with mouse droppings. She was definitely going to be more careful about eating her lunch here now.

  He jumped down and washed his hands with an excessive amount of soap. After he dried them, he came toward her with a smile, holding his hands out to his sides in question like a Shakespearean orator. “Verily, I hath once again banished evil from the land of Gregory Fields Incorporated…Art thou well-pleased, wench?”

  She shook her head at him. “You are such a dork. It’s a good thing I’m your best friend, otherwise I don’t even know what you would do,” she joked.

  “You know you love it, Collins,” Jared said, laying his arm over her shoulder and guiding her back toward the office.

  “Guilty,” she agreed, putting her arm around his waist as they walked.

  She wasn’t excited one bit to be this close to him. Her heart did not race in her chest. She also did not notice that his waist was very well-muscled. When they got back to their partitions, she ruffled his slightly unkempt, slightly long, brown hair affectionately.

  “Get back to work, Carson. And thank you for exorcising the popcorn demon from the hallowed halls of GFI. Your name shall be remembered in the annals of mankind forever.” She placed her hands together and bowed slightly.

  After he rolled back to his desk, in the same way he had rolled away from it, she heard his voice drift toward her once more. “Don’t thank me, Collins. I did it for the good of all humanity.”

  She grinned and barely even noticed the unpleasant burning buttery popcorn smell that still drifted around the room.

  She heard a brief aerosol hiss, and suddenly the smell of chemically engineered tropical flowers floated down around her head, somewhat covering the offensive odor.

  Thanks Jared.

  Chapter Two

  A Blip on the Radar

  Anna turned down the resistance to a more moderate level and started her cool down. She was getting her nightly thirty minutes on the elliptical in her small spare bedroom. The news was broadcasting from the small flatscreen on the wall, but she wasn’t paying much attention. It was all bad news anyway. More debt, more terrorist attacks, more diseases spreading, more job losses.

  She worried about h
er job sometimes, but people would always need office supplies, right? The company she worked at was a small distributer of office supplies for a major corporation. She didn’t anticipate the corporation going under. Notepads and paperclips were here to stick around. The company was even making gains on the market thanks to some new innovations in the stapler industry, which was reassuring.

  She grimaced as the burning in her legs reached an almost unendurable level. This was a cool down, really, but she didn’t like to slow down or stop early. It felt like failure. Instead, she turned up the T.V. and tried to concentrate on that. Didn’t work, but she didn’t have the energy to change it.

  She caught the tail end of a report about a lab explosion in a remote part of Russia. It wasn’t much. It didn’t have any ramifications for them here, and from the way they were reporting it, it wasn’t even that odd of a thing. She remembered other times when incidents like that happened. They seemed so calm about it. She wondered if the Russians were effective at responding to them.

  She finally turned off the machine and stepped down. She chugged a small bottle of water and wiped her face on her t-shirt. The clock on the T.V. showed that it was six-thirty. She wobbled toward the small kitchen and pulled a bag of broccoli from the freezer and popped it into the microwave. That reminded her of their top-secret mission today and she smiled. He made her look forward to work every day.

  She wondered what Jared was doing right now. She didn’t think he had a girlfriend or a wife because he never mentioned one in their years working together and didn’t wear a ring. He was thirty-one, good-looking, and single…so what was his deal?

  They had worked together for two years now. She finished college and got hired at Gregory Fields right off the bat. He was her trainer that first month, then her friend after that. He had been with the company for five years, after transferring from a larger city. He didn’t talk about anything else from his past.

  She was glad she had decided to settle here. Kennedy was a small town in the northern part of the South. It was so far north that it was almost in the Midwest. It had the homey, friendly feel of a rural southern town, but the amenities and opportunities of a small city. It was perfect for her. The tree-lined streets and the quaint business districts were a welcome change from the bustle of the large city she went to school in. If she got bored, a metropolitan area was a short drive away. She hadn’t made it there yet.

  When the broccoli finished steaming, she dumped it on a plate with a small baked chicken breast and a little pile of yellow rice. She made up a weeks’ worth of meals every Sunday and even though she always complained about it at the time, during the week she was always thankful she had done it.

  They didn’t have much food growing up, and her mom always had to plan each meal carefully. That was back before meal planning became a huge conscious thing like it is now with endless cookbooks, containers, and Pinterest. Her mom never relied on state assistance, she was too proud. Anna wished she had sometimes, maybe she wouldn’t have been so stressed.

  Maybe she wouldn’t have gotten sick.

  The rest of her family was all dead or in jail. Technically only her father was in jail. Her mom, who had raised her alone, died of breast cancer when she was only nineteen. She left behind just enough money to help pay for Anna’s college.

  Anna’s dad was a dead beat who had murdered someone for drugs about twenty years ago. He went to prison when she was just a little kid and they never heard from him again. No big loss there. She chewed a piece of broccoli.

  Needs salt.

  Her grandparents had all passed away. She truly had nobody on this earth except her co-workers, and even they were a bit iffy. Most of the Sales Team —as opposed to the general sales department that she and Jared belonged to— were a bit stuck up. The ones who weren’t were just too busy to socialize and she didn’t really have much in common with them anyway.

  There were a few good people at the office that she liked. Jared, of course. Jill, the receptionist was quirky and fun to be around, but she was a temporary worker and flighty, and Anna knew she would be moving on to a different job soon.

  Juan, one of the newer members of the sales team, was a good guy. His wife cooked awesome meals and he sometime brought extras to work for everyone. They had two boys at home. Anna and Juan sometimes talked at lunch. His stories about his wife and sons made her ache for a family of her own.

  All this thinking was starting to get her depressed and she decided that she had enough for today. It was Monday and she didn’t usually drink any wine during the week, but tonight she made an exception. She took a small glass of Cabernet to her bedroom and quickly showered and got ready for bed. She flipped on the T.V. to an old sitcom that she enjoyed. She sipped her wine, relaxed, and tried to get her mind off her loneliness.

  At five in the morning, the T.V. was still on, though the volume was lowered. A news alert woke her groggily and she fumbled for the remote. She clicked off the set and went back to sleep. She missed the special report journalists broadcasted in Siberia.

  ◆◆◆

  “Someone stole my popcorn!” Darla called out to the entire office. The heavy accusation settled, dampening the usual flurry of activity. Darla making loud accusations wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary.

  Anna looked up from her work and scooted her chair out to the main walkthrough. Jared and all the others were doing the same. They were like prairie dogs popping out of their little dens. Darla was standing at the front of the room, near reception, and all eyes were on her livid face. Anna settled her features into a mask of polite concern. It was hard because she knew Jared was staring at her right now, an exaggerated look of horror on his handsome face.

  She knew him too well.

  She glanced back tentatively and suppressed a laugh.

  ‘Oh no!’ he mimed.

  Yep, she was right.

  “I keep expecting Mr. Hubbard to call me in about it,” she whispered. “It’s like the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head.”

  “No swearing in the office, Anna,” Mr. Hubbard said as he trundled past them with his briefcase. Her co-workers nearby turned to her with censuring looks.

  She looked at Jared with open-mouthed shock. Jared widened his eyes in amusement and shrugged. “Watch your filthy mouth!” he murmured to her behind Hubbard’s back.

  “But I didn’t…” She trailed off when she realized Mr. Hubbard was gone.

  She huffed and focused back on Darla’s tirade.

  “I’m going to security, and I’m going to go over the camera footage from yesterday. I will find the thief. This is despicable!” Darla pressed a hand to her large, heaving chest and scanned the room. Anna kept up her sympathetic face for another moment.

  “There is no security footage in this section of the building,” Jared said from behind her.

  “Then why are those up in the ceiling, Mr. Smarty Pants?” Darla said sarcastically, pointing at the black lenses strategically positioned around the room.

  “My God, you must be right! Carry on,” Jared said, waving his permission for her to continue her diatribe against the nefarious popcorn thief.

  His statement to Darla almost caused her to lose her composure, but she managed to reign in the giggles at the very last second. Then she realized what exactly those cameras meant for them.

  Anna’s heart jumped a bit. She didn’t consider the cameras yesterday. In fact, she forgot all about them. What the hell was she thinking? As Darla continued raving to the rapt office workers, Anna turned to Jared worriedly. He shook his head slightly and leaned forward.

  She leaned toward him, and he whispered, “They don’t work. They’re just a deterrent.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, worry wrinkling her forehead.

  “Absolutely. The only ones that work are in the warehouse, the storeroom, and the parking lots.” He looked a bit smug with his knowledge.

  “So, I guess that rules out makeout sessions in the storeroom?”

&nbs
p; “Not if you enjoy being watched and recorded for posterity. However, I would strongly urge you to consider the break room closet instead. It’s much more private. And there’s a folding chair.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she deadpanned.

  He winked at her and scooted slowly back into his cubicle. She blew out a deep breath and got back to work. At least Darla’s ranting wasn’t nearly as distracting as the burnt popcorn smell, and Mr. Hubbard would put a stop to it soon with a couple of placating pats on the back.

  Pretty sure the entire office was grateful for their little sabotage mission yesterday.

  ◆◆◆

  At lunch, Anna sat with Jared at their usual table. She noticed that the microwave had an out of order sign on the front, likely placed there by a very irate Darla —if the enraged handwriting was any indication— who was at this moment seated nearby staring morosely at her special, empty popcorn bowl. She had made do with pouring in a couple of bags of snack sized chips from the vending machine, but it didn’t look like she was getting nearly as much enjoyment from them.

  It almost made Anna feel guilty. Almost, but not quite.

  Anna went back to eating, not really feeling much like socializing today. Usually, Jared had some funny story to tell, but today he was strangely silent. He had been since Darla’s outburst this morning. It wasn’t like him, and she wondered if he was worried about something else. Or maybe he was coming down with something?

  Jared and Anna both startled when the T.V. on the wall suddenly turned on, loudly blaring the news alert to the mostly unoccupied break room. Jared grinned a bit at their skittishness, and they turned in their chairs to watch whatever the news people thought was worthy of an alert. They seemed to make everything an alert these days, and now it mostly meant nothing.

  “What the hell?” Jared said and leaned closer to watch. There was a map of the world on the screen and the commentators were discussing it.

  “Was there some kind of attack?” Anna asked him. Part of Russia had a red bullseye covering it, along with Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe. Other areas were outlined in yellow.